Midterm
Take the opportunity to check in with your advisees before the mid-term deadline (see the Yale College Calendar with Pertinent Deadlines. Invite them to join you for lunch in your residential college or set up advising office hours. You may learn that a student is struggling and has not thought about getting a tutor for a given course. Or it may be that the best way for a student to manage a difficult situation is to drop a course, or limit extracurricular involvement. By building on the relationships you established last term and at the start of this term, you can find out more about how your advisees are faring in their ongoing transition to college life.
You might also discuss study habits, efficient organization of their work-week, and realistic allotment of study time to different types of courses. Ask your advisees whether new courses have brought up a need for extra help and refer them as needed to Yale’s extensive tutoring programs for one-on-one support in writing, foreign languages, science, and quantitative reasoning (including for most introductory courses in mathematics, economics, and the natural sciences). The dean of your residential college can describe these programs for you or your advisees in much more detail.
End-of-term
As you can imagine, stress levels run high at the end of the term.
Your freshman advisees would benefit from an encouraging email from you, should you care to send one. You might offer your help, or perhaps suggest a lunchtime meeting or a coffee break to discuss study strategies. You might also let them know — if you’re a faculty member — that you enjoyed advising them or offer your services if they were unsuccessful in securing a sophomore faculty adviser.
What you write is not as important as the very fact that you have written. Some advisees respond to our efforts to reach out and some don’t. Regardless, please know that your efforts as part of their “constellation of advisers” are important and appreciated.